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I don’t know if the Australian launch of the Dreamcast was on your radar, but it was bad. How bad? It was so bad that you couldn’t buy memory cards, or controllers, or games for the damn thing for weeks after the machine was on sale. It was so bad that the (slower than standard) built in modem was locked so it could only access one ISP that charged $5 an hour to access.

It was so bad that I wrote some really scathing reports about why the launch was so badly botched, and named the Sega Australia brand managers responsible for it all happening. These reports got picked up by overseas publications including Edge (OMG EDGE READ SOMETHING I WROTE WHAAAT) and it apparently caused a bit of a storm within Sega globally.

It was so bad that after the launch, those brand managers called up my boss and demanded I be fired. To my bosses credit they got laughed off the phone.

Anyway. Fast forward a few years and I’m writing for a different publication in Australia, and they send Sega Australia a request for them to send me a copy of Sonic Adventure 2 for review. It arrives a week after deadline…shattered into pieces.

Not “oh the post man must have dropped it, oops” kind of shattered, but the kind of shattered you can only get when you deliberately attack a Dreamcast case with a hammer for a few minutes.

I ended up having to pirate the damn game over a 56k modem connection to get the review done in time, and the game was great! Geez, everyone that worked for Sega Australia were jerks.